On the 6 October 1981, the world watched with horror as the West's most important Arab ally, Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat, was shot dead on live television. It was the first preview of a Jihad that sought to kill for piety. Thirty years later, Islamist militants struck again, this time on American soil, causing death and destruction in the heartland of the world's superpower.

This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about the ‘failure’ of American intelligence in a post 9/11 age: have Western experts in some fundamental way failed to understand the dynamics, leaders and culture of the Middle East? Analysing recent history through a series of seminal case studies, this monograph explores whether, how and why the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off guard in the region.

The story begins after the tripartite invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956. This momentous event set in motion a ripple of ideological and geopolitical transformations that continue to shape the politics and borders of the modern Middle East. Upheaval marked the two decades that followed: revolutions swept across Syria, Iraq and Yemen; three devastating Arab–Israeli wars ravaged the Holy Lands; and eventually a fraught and contested bilateral treaty bound Egypt and Israel to uneasy peace. The West and the Soviet Union vied for control over the Middle East's destiny through its political centre, Egypt. As the largest and most populous Arab state, Egypt forms the pivot of this book. The transition from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar el Sadat witnessed the decline of an ardently anti-imperialist Arab nationalism, supplanted by a radical quest to realign Egypt's identity towards the Western world.

The background to this story has been well told. The British granted Egypt formal independence in 1922 but decades of indirect rule ensued. A weak and corrupt Egyptian monarchy was personified by the lecherous and indulgent figure of King Farouk. Egypt's brief interwar flirtation with parliamentary democracy saw the dominance of an increasingly discredited nationalist Wafd party. In the years building up to the Egyptian revolution, the Wafd was widely viewed as little more than a British puppet. In 1948, a humiliating Egyptian defeat in the first Arab–Israeli war galvanised both popular and military opposition to the Egyptian regime.